Does Death Make Us Equal?

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTIONDeath and mortality raise, rather obviously, difficult issues of social and political equality and inequality. People in different countries and different socio-economic classes face their deaths-and the oftenpainful processes of dying leading up to their deaths-in quite different ways. Differences in life expectancy and the availability of adequate medical services and end-of-life care tend to vary considerably, and increasingly, across socioeconomic classes even in relatively and homogeneous societies (e.g., the Nordic welfare societies); typically, such variations are enormous in third world countries. However, this socio-economic-political notion of equality vs. inequality is not the focus of the present paper. Instead, I propose to discuss the topic of equality in a more metaphysical, or even existential, sense. Such an approach to this issue may, I hope, be indirectly relevant to the more political questions of inequality as well. While the paper thus primarily adopts the perspective of individual ethics, the basic concerns raised regarding our equality in the face of death need to be addressed by anyone hoping to understand this phenomenon from the point of view of social ethics and political philosophy.Politically, inequality may be the problem, but existentially the situation may be reverse: equality, rather than inequality, may be what troubles us in our relation to human mortality. has been regarded as the leveller-this is how Mark Johnston puts the matter in his fascinating and highly controversial book, Surviving (2010). Johnston begins from the observation that death is a threat to the of goodness: Death is the great leveller; if the good and the bad alike go down into oblivion, if there is nothing about reality itself that shores up this basic moral difference between their lives ... then the distinction between the good and the bad is less So goodness is less important.1 This serious threat to the significance of morality as such is genuine even if moral considerations are regarded as overriding or superior to any other considerations, because can ask about the importance of the moral point of view itself, given that reality-as depicted by secular naturalism-is indifferent to the very distinction that point of view treats as so important. The world itself seems to be deaf to the cries that injustice deserves punishment and goodness reward.2 This indifference, which is a certain kind of equality, is a (if not the) fundamental existential challenge that mortality sets us.I will return to Johnston's views in due course, but let me anticipate: I agree with him that we should not regard our lives as morally indifferent just because we die; yet, I disagree with him on the kind of solutions available to this ethically and metaphysically demanding problem. Let us, however, first consider some other dimensions of the equality (or inequality) of death and mortality.2. DEMOCRATIC (IM)MORTALITYEven immortality, not only mortality, can be and has been examined by drawing attention to the notion of equality or its analogues. There are thinkers according to whom it is important to make sure that we would be equal in the face of death not just because we all equally die but even if we in some sense were to survive death. For instance, some fifteen years ago a minister of the Finnish Lutheran Church, Antti Kylliainen-who then became a public figure because of the minor scandal he caused-claimed that everyone goes to Heaven. God's mercy, according to this highly democratic version of the Christian doctrine (which conservative critics unsurprisingly found heretical), is equally available to us all, including the worst of sinners. A benevolent and merciful God cannot, according to this view, eternally punish or disregard even those who never repent their sins and refuse to believe in Christ.3There are also more philosophical examples of a basically similar idea available. …